With public providers, such as Dropbox and OneDrive, to access our data seamlessly from anywhere in the world, cloud storage has become an integral part of both personal and professional lives. Unlike yesteryears, when companies relied on physical storages, there’s growing uptake of cloud services due to the number of perks it presents, which includes reduced cost, high availability, convenience, reliability, scalability, and compliance.
Notably, cloud storage enables employees to work remotely, which means it increases the productivity of your business. OneDrive is an online cloud storage platform that offers a free room, with an option to pay around $10 per month for 1 TB of storage. Unlike Dropbox, it’s the most preferred of the two services since it gives bigger storage space and has even more compelling features that befit the reason to migrate Dropbox to OneDrive. However, undertaking any corporate migration can present a great deal of elbow grease for your company.
So, when moving from Dropbox to OneDrive, here are some of the cloud migration tips to keep in mind.
Select A Cloud Migration Service Provider
One of the critical tips when migrating from Dropbox to OneDrive as an enterprise is to choose a service provider that guarantees top-notch and seamless service.
Such a service provider will help in case you have terabytes of data stored in your Dropbox account since they have the capability and experience in automating such tasks.
Understand The Size of Your Data
Knowing the size of the data from a Dropbox account that you need to transfer to OneDrive will apprise you in making more informed decisions on whether to work individually or engage the services of cloud migration service provider. As mentioned above, the latter has expertise in flawlessly managing labor-intensive migration procedures.
Moreover, knowing the size of your data helps you in cross-referencing the amount of data that are being migrated, ensuring you don’t end up missing critical data when doing the migration.
User Accounts and Permissions
User accounts and permissions are perhaps the most challenging part of the migration process. Especially if you have plenty of employees or users already using your previous file hosting service, in this case, Dropbox.
For instance, if you have a Dropbox account with over 50 users, and a data totaling up to 100GB. In case you’re using a migration service provider, both the users and the size of data will be taken into account when estimating the cost. Hence, it’s prudent to understand that multi-user migrations might require you to dig deeper into your pockets due to the tasks involved in maintaining user permissions and user hierarchy throughout the migration.
Moreover, it’s important to note that Dropbox manages sharing and permissions by limiting sharing based on already shared folders or files. Dropbox will prevent you from sharing permissions of any individual subfolders within a shared folder and you cannot change the sharing scheme unless or until you unshare the subfolder.
Retain Folder Structure
Always keep the folder structure intact during your cloud data migration. This will ensure a smooth transition, enabling you and your employees to browse through your new OneDrive platform with ease.
This can be extremely useful with complicated and broad folder structures. When users are able to get their working files with ease, it reduces any transition bottlenecks that may hamper productivity.
Review File Folder Path-lengths
OneDrive has file and folder path limitations of 400 characters. Hence, being in the know of such limitations upfront can help you prepare adequately by reviewing your file paths and shorten them with necessary tools for easier cloud migration.
Although it might be unusual to get a file or folder path that exceeds 400 characters, this is sometimes a common problem with websites or web pages directly converted to pdf files.
Consider Invalid File Names and File Types
When migrating to OneDrive, you can experience problems with different conventions of filenames. Onedrive is very particular on the file naming scheme.
Below is a list of some of the invalid names in OneDrive:
# Files that contain- *:<>? | / \
# Filenames with .loc, CON,NUL, desktop.ini
# File names with the leading tildes (~)
# Network shared files that are not stored on your workstation
# For Mac OS systems, files stored in case sensitive formatted disks
Contrarily, OneDrive accepts a number of file types, and this shouldn’t be a point of worry during your migration process.
Paper Document in Dropbox
Some paper documents from Dropbox are not readable in OneDrive. Hence, it’s up to you, in collaboration with the cloud migration assistant, to download the files directly from Dropbox, convert them into a readable format accepted by OneDrive, and after that, upload them to OneDrive.
However, this can easily be automated with an experienced migration service since it can be a daunting task when working with many files.
Dropbox File Versions
One common hindrance is that OneDrive file versions are incompatible with Dropbox file versions. Hence, they don’t automatically map to one another. So, it’s appropriate to understand the requirement in maintaining file versions.
Some cloud migrations service providers allow you to specify the number of versions you intend to migrate, which can save you the legwork. Such functionality can help the migration team to only migrate the intended information within the given scope of work.
Additionally, when doing cloud data migrations, it’s essential to be realistic with process timelines – from planning, execution, to finishing up the migration.
Some of the crucial factors to keep in mind include the organization’s requirements, the available budget, as well as management support.
If possible, simulated dry-runs can help the business in making projections of the timelines as well as identifying any problems before the actual exercise.
A multi-cloud storage manager can also be employed to ease the migration process since it enables file syncing across different cloud providers.
Conclusion
With Onedrive presenting better benefits compared to Dropbox, such as their integration with Office 365, most businesses business are most likely to migrate.
Some of the key tips to keep in mind when migrating includes: selecting a reliable migration service, understanding the size of your data, retaining folder structure, reviewing file folder path lengths, considering invalid filenames and file types, and knowing how to migrate paper document from Dropbox to OneDrive.
